Duchess of Milan (33 page)

“They have always seen me in armor. To them Galeazzo di Sanseverino is twice the man I am and has an iron head.”

Galeazz and Beatrice completed their preparations and sent their escort back to Vigevano. They headed off at a right angle to the canal, riding beside one of the main irrigation conduits. Hedges, rows of trees, and the grassy ridges of the irrigation ditches neatly squared the boundaries of the fields. Only once did they cross a natural stream, bordered with trees, its bed thick with cattails and vines. Periodically they saw in the distance prosperous farmhouses with colonnaded porches and brick stables stocked with hay; each farm’s obligatory vineyard could be identified by the bristly rows of dead saplings used to train the vines. More frequently they passed the well-kept cottages of tenant farmers, with their raucous poultry yards and precise little herb gardens.

Eventually their path intersected a rutted dirt road lined with cypresses. The music blared. They passed a peasant in a wine-stained smock shuffling almost unconsciously down the road; he attempted to tip his hat to the travelers, realized that he didn’t have a hat, and began furiously to curse some imaginary companion.

The village consisted of the church and a few shops arranged around a tiny piazza. A crowd of several hundred people, so dense and antic that it appeared to be engaged in pulling down the little cluster of buildings, packed the road, the piazza, and the shop arcades. Many were tenant farmers in their best colored hose and dyed wool tunics; the owners of the larger farms wore silk or damask doublets and tooled leather shoes. Gamblers, fortunetellers, and traveling musicians worked the crowd, their gaudy multicolored hose and short jackets adding a rakish accent. The
vecchie
wore conservative wool dresses and old-fashioned white aprons, but many of the younger women were dressed like middle-rank Milanese prostitutes, with plunging damask bodices and cheap jewelry; most had put aside the ceremonial, newly cut May sprigs in favor of wineskins and flasks filled from the barrels set up around the piazza.

The new arrivals were welcomed by bellowing vendors offering spitted capons and pigeons, pastries arrayed on tables, melon slices, cheeses, pickled eels, baked trout, a healing oil said to cure burns and relieve gastric distress, and an aphrodisiac made of sparrows’ brains. The wine had proved to be the most effective aphrodisiac, however. Young men and women, their faces wearing the brilliant flush of advanced inebriation, clutched one another so shamelessly that they might have been in bed with the lamps out instead of standing in a public square.

The farm boys openly eyed Beatrice as she walked among them, and she found their frank, besotted appraisal an appealing contrast to the sexual stealth practiced in Milan. She watched a rustically handsome young man wearing ridiculous, curled-toe French-style slippers wriggle his hand into the bodice of a big-boned girl about her own age, and she felt no surprise or shame at the stirring inside her. Ever since Beatrice had come under the sway of her older sister’s adolescent sexuality at age twelve, her girl’s dreams of romance had included increasingly graphic images of raw passion. And while marriage had destroyed that and every other aspect of her romantic yearnings, motherhood (and of course her liberation from Messer Ambrogio’s schedule) had somehow relit the lamp of desire. She had a child and all that meant to her, yet her love for her baby made her acutely aware that something was still missing. She wanted a man. Someone to hold
her.
The love of a man would make her love for her baby complete.

Galeazz bought Beatrice a flask of wine, and soon she was buoyant in the late afternoon heat.  Local dignitaries shouted speeches against the increasing din of the celebration. Most of the speakers began by toasting Il Moro as the architect of local prosperity and, having no need to observe the protocol of court, said nothing about the Duke of Milan. Beatrice observed this with far less surprise or chagrin than she would have felt only a few months previously. When she had first started visiting the various engineering and agricultural projects--usually in the company of Galeazz--she had imagined that she would expose the meagerness of the “good works” her husband had claimed to be so intent on accomplishing. But instead she had exposed her own ignorance of the vast transformation in the countryside around Milan, the irrigation and canal projects and the revitalization of scores of towns and villages--things she had never seen while riding in the ducal parks with Eesh.

When the speeches ended, the makeshift band attempted to construct a fast-paced dance at about the tempo of a
moresca.
Three professional lute players bravely established the melody, their practiced notes challenged by the flailing beat of a one-armed drummer and a corps of local boys with their
cacarelle.
The awful hum of the
cacarella
was produced by drawing a string through a hide membrane stretched over a pot, and the boys’ arms jerked up and down frantically, as if they were trying to pound a harmony into their noisemakers.

Beatrice brought Galeazz into the whirling circle of dancers and found the thread of rhythm in the band’s cacophony. She felt light and airy in a way she never had under her dance master’s baton at home, suddenly free of heavy girlish legs and inhibitions. Her polished style soon drew attention, and for a while she captivated the crowd; they gathered around her, murmuring
“Che bellezza”
and exclaiming, “She dances like a goddess!” Eventually her worshipers were distracted by a particularly spirited slugfest between two young men. But by then, Beatrice had accepted what she never would have permitted herself to believe as a girl. I
am
beautiful. Especially when I dance.

Not so beautiful as Galeazz. She clutched his powerful, graceful hand and thought: If only he didn’t belong to Bianca, whom I can never betray . . . Would she really risk it? She remembered one of the most vivid experiences of her childhood. Her father’s father, Niccolo, who had died almost a half century before she was born, had sired so many bastards that he had inspired a local ditty:
“Di qua e di la del Po, tutti figli di Niccolo”
--On this and that side of the river Po, all are the children of Niccolo. As an old man, Niccolo had taken a young second wife, who had been more attracted to Niccolo’s eldest son. Betrayed by a lady-in-waiting, the lovers had been confronted and condemned to a last night in the dungeon of the Este
castello;
the next morning a weeping Niccolo had manfully enforced his double standard and watched while his wife and his heir had their heads chopped off. One night Beatrice and her sister had gone down to the dungeon, then no longer in use; legend had it that if they were very quiet, they could still hear the doomed lovers’ tears and whispers as they waited for that last dawn. Beatrice and her sister had stood there in the darkness, hands tightly clasped, trying not to disturb the baleful silence with even the sound of their own breathing. After a while they heard a hiss like distant surf. The ghostly whispers became sighs, racing in cold spirit gasps through the eerily animate shadows, and when she and Bel couldn’t stand it any longer, they had run screaming out of love’s dark underworld. . . . What about Eesh? Had Eesh really slept with someone else? If she had, Beatrice envied her.

Beatrice paused to empty half a flask of wine. Then she rejoined the whirling, chaotic dance, the colors softening in the dimming evening light, until motion itself seemed to become a pale golden hue. Free, she thought, freer than I ever have been. I have learned more in the past two months than I did in all my old life. She saw her baby’s face, his first toothless smiles, just as she did a hundred times every day she was away from him. My baby is the center. But around him everything else whirled.

Eesh. Why hadn’t she just gone to Pavia and settled with Eesh? Perhaps because she was afraid she would prove what she suspected in the depths of her soul, that she didn’t really know Eesh any better than she did her husband, that just as her husband was capable of good works--if only to serve his own vanity and pride--Eesh was capable of the most terrible lies and deception. For a dizzying instant she could see Eesh and her husband spinning around her like a ring of dancers, proclaiming their own virtues, shouting their mutual accusations.

Eesh or her husband. Was that a choice she would one day have to make, to find the truth in their shouting circle of lies? Not today. Today she could not choose, did not need to choose, because in her new world of spinning possibilities, truth was a blur. A lover perhaps, a deception of her own. She swished her dress and pirouetted in the twilight, the speed of her movement multiplied by the revolving circle of dancers, and imagined herself a spinning star rushing through the heavens on the orbit of Fortune’s wheel.

CHAPTER 29

Naples, 14 May 1493

The two men found slight handholds in the joints between the huge gray stones at the seaward base of the Castel Nuovo. They looked back across the Bay of Naples, an inky void curtained by a fabric of stars. Surges of dark water slapped against the stone, lifting the men’s bodies and forcing them to expend energy simply to rest. Strong swimmers, they had entered the water more than an hour previously, dropped from a tiny rowboat far out in the bay.

The swimmers turned their attention to the steeply angled stone face extending another ten arm-spans above them. The entire seafront of the enormous fortress-palace was surrounded by this skirt of stone. Above it the Castel Nuovo’s towering facade rose to command a panoramic view of the Bay of Naples. Just past the line where the slope of the stone skirt merged with the sheer, vertical facade was a single small window, barred and shuttered.

“Now we’ll find out what our gold has bought,” one of the men whispered. “If that window isn’t open ...”

“It will be open,” the other replied. “If we have been betrayed they will be waiting for us.”

Both men fell silent, contemplating in the dark the certainty of prolonged torture and death if they were discovered. In tandem they cinched the knives strapped around their bare waists; they had made the swim in their breeches. Finally the first man whispered again. “Our father’s soul will never know peace until we have done this.”

They began slowly to make their way up the steep incline, finding precarious perches for fingers and toes on the slight ridges created by massive stones cut only slightly less than perfectly. The two men were brothers, one twenty-two, the other nineteen, the sons of one of the Neapolitan noblemen who had vanished on the night of Ferrante’s infamous reconciliation banquet. The two young men did not need rumors of the Christmas Day massacre to incite their courage. Their mother had also been taken prisoner at Ferrante’s banquet, and had later been released--raped, tortured, a sobbing corpse. All of the family’s property and lands had been confiscated and the surviving members banished. Like many of the exiles who had not fled to France, these two young men had disappeared into the rugged countryside of southern Italy. What little of their jewels and gold they had been able to take with them had been spent buying spies and informants inside the Castel Nuovo. Their acquisitions included one of the Duke of Calabria’s secretaries, who had informed them--for a staggering price--of the prize they had come to claim tonight.

The shutters had been unlatched. The brothers crossed themselves. The elder brother, who was called Giovann by his friends and family, slipped through the bars, pausing to survey what he could of the room. The metal of small firearms and pikes glimmered in the faint illumination from the starlight outside. Giovann dropped to the floor and waited. A moment later his brother’s bare feet slapped the wooden floor beside him.

The opening to the passageway within the walls was where they had been told it would be. After prying the wood panel away, Giovann again went in first. The blackness was so complete that it seemed to have density, making the dank air even more difficult to breathe. Crouching, his head grazing the low stone ceiling and his elbows rubbing against the slimy walls, Giovann imagined encountering a dead end and returning to find the entrance bricked up. He wondered how many days he and his brother would live, scratching the walls like trapped rodents.

They had been told that the passageway would end at a large
guardaroba.
After spending some time forcing another panel, Giovann crawled into the storeroom. Still on his knees, he looked up, felt fear like a cold hand stroking his back, and tried to muffle his involuntary cry. The eyes, closely set and lit red by some faint, indirect light, floated just in front of his face, then flashed as he reached for his knife. His scalp seared and his cheek itched. Not until he felt the weight against him did Giovann realize that his assailant was not human, and only then did he vaguely remember something about leopards used to deter theft and control the rat population in Alfonso’s
guardaroba.
He somehow got his knife free and frantically pounded it a half-dozen times into the supple, frighteningly powerful body. The leopard howled and stilled. Giovann scrambled up, his face and back fired with pain, his brother pushing behind him. The doorway exploded with light.

His brother collided with the first guard and sent the blazing wax taper flying against the wall. The second guard also carried a torch, and Giovann leapt at him and pounded his knife into his stomach. The guard called out
“Gesu! Gesu!”
and Giovann had to silence him with a slash across the windpipe. Then he wheeled on the guard struggling with his brother and savagely plunged the knife into his back. A deep groan followed, and the guard collapsed.

The only sound was the hissing and gurgling from the guard’s severed windpipe. Giovann picked up a still-burning torch and went to help his sibling. As soon as the light revealed his brother’s eyes, Giovann knew that he would leave the Castel Nuovo alone.

His brother pressed bloody fingers against the glistening bowels bulging from the slash across his abdomen. He shook his head. “I am a dead man,” he said almost in wonder. “Sweet Jesus will take me out of here tonight.”